Jason Buffington .com

Cohesity had a huge day of announcements as part of its Catalyst 1 Data Summit, with the foundation being built on its Five Steps of Cyber Resilience.

While every vendor, including Cohesity, wants to talk about ‘resilience’, they haven’t lost sight of the reality that none of the aspirational resilience is achievable until you are reliably backing up your data. In Cohesity taxonomy, Step (1) is unapologetically ‘Protect all data’.  ‘All’ has appreciable implications when considering that Veritas NetBackup has some of the broadest capabilities for protecting legacy and datacenter-centric workloads, while Cohesity’s more modern approach focuses on many more of the cloud-hosted platforms that enterprises rely on. Collectively, the C+V ‘all’ is likely more comprehensive than claims by others (see earlier blog on the potential of merging engineering, as well as key takeaway 2 below).

In Cohesity’s maturation journey, steps (2) ensure recoverability and (3) detect threats are the foundation of cyber resilience with a recovery-first goal and a recognition of the need to integrate proactive cyber technologies into a holistic recovery strategy.

But what I was most pleased to see is step (4) practice resilience.  As disaster recovery and business continuity experts have said for decades and resilience folks ought to be saying today, “you will never get better at something if you don’t practice”. Recognizing the importance of orchestration and iteration is paramount to every resilience strategy.

To round out Cohesity’s model, step (5) optimize. And while Catalyst’s announcement is around ‘optimizing data risk posture’, I would argue that optimize has even broader implications when you think about AI’s potential to discern data context, business value, and regulatory implications – and then improve steps 1 and 2 to protect important data differently and ensure recoverability more rigorously for the data that matters most. For Cohesity, maybe that’s an expansion of Step 5 or even a step 6 as we start to see the potential of AI be realized over the next few years.

You can read the rest of the announcements as part of the Cohesity press release .

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